Your email list is one of the most important assets that you can have in an online business.

It doesn’t matter if you sell physical products or digital products and services. When you have a small targeted email list, it’s easier to start any business in any niche, because you have instant access to a database of potential customers who are interested in what you want to sell.

It’s not easy to build an email list, especially when you are just starting out, but there are a few methods that you can use to get great results.

Here are the 5 easiest ways to start building your email list:

Use inserts. If you sell physical products on Amazon, or on your own website, add an insert—tell your customers to go to your website or landing page and enter their name and email address in exchange for something you give them for free. You can give them an extended warranty for their products, a discount code for future purchases, an ebook, or even a video course. Your imagination is the limit for what you can give them for free, in exchange for their contact information.

Create educational content (articles) on your website, and share them through social media in groups interested in your niche. Try to rank these articles on google and other search engines for specific targeted keywords, in order to get traffic to them. On your website, add different types of opt-in forms (sidebar opt-ins, pop-ups, or hello bars). Once you get traction with this, it’s a never ending source of free leads.

Build a landing page and drive traffic to it. This can be one of the most effective methods if you get it right. First of all, think of something that you can give away for free to your subscribers. Make sure that what you are giving away is related to what you want to sell, so that it makes sense to customers when your promote it to them in the future. After this is ready, start driving traffic to that landing page (using Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, or other types of paid traffic). Make sure to test this and tweak it many times before you get the optimum conversion rate—but once you do that, scale as much as you want.

Create a Facebook group. The admin of the group can ask members a set of questions before they join the group. One of the questions might be for your members to give you their email address in order to join the group. Grow your group to the stage where it gets organic traffic— a few member requests every day. Once you get the group to that stage, be sure that you also have good content, good branding, and great interaction in the group, so that people will recognize the emails they get from you. This method is free, and if your group grows larger and larger, you will get more member requests every day (which means more email subscribers every day).

Build a YouTube channel. Start creating tutorial videos for your niche, which you can easily rank for targeted keywords. The more videos you upload and rank, the more free targeted traffic you will get from Youtube. In the video description, add a link to an opt-in form or landing page where people can go and subscribe to your email list. Be sure to point this out at the end of the videos! This method has two advantages: First, you build a following on Youtube, and second, you build your email list using free targeted traffic.

These 5 methods of growing your email list are the easiest to start with, and the most cost-effective. The majority of them don’t even require driving paid traffic!

Now it’s time for you to take action and start using the methods that are the best fit for you. Focus on one method at a time until you make it work, then scale by moving on to a different one.

Learn more about email marketing with Sorin Constantin’s course, “Email Marketing Basics: A Step-By-Step Beginner’s Guide.” Access this course on Amazing.com with the link below:

One way to be successful on Amazon is to create a successful business, sell it, start another business, and keep repeating the process. Brendan Morris, SellerCon attendee and Amazing Selling Machine member, shares his insight into this process and provides tips on how sellers can effectively build a successful Amazon business that people will want to buy.

His tips include focusing entirely on cash flow, automating as much as the process as possible, strategically selecting smaller items to build up the brand, and doing a ton of research on keywords before starting out.